Spring-break service programs offer a moral alternative to the madness

BY ANTHONY FLOTT

March 26-April 1, 2006 Issue |
Posted 3/27/06 at 10:00 AM

It’s
many a parent’s nightmare. A college-age son or daughter heads to some steamy
spring-break destination, cools off with a few too many alcoholic beverages and
then, somehow, ends up appearing in the kind of “too-hot-to-handle” videos
hawked on late-night TV.

And who knows what the
adolescent was doing when the camera wasn’t
rolling?

Kelly Orbik, a senior
at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., knows the scene. “A lot of poor choices
are made during what seems like an all-inclusive getaway to an exotic place,”
she says. It’s those poor choices that have made the producers of “Girls Gone
Wild” videos, not to mention Jerry Springer, wealthy men.

Orbik and fellow
Creighton student Marie Young have put together their own spring-break video,
loading it with candid pictures and making it available online. There’s not a
beach in sight, though.

Instead, students are
pictured planting in fields, chopping wood, teaching grade-school students,
moving bales of hay, mopping and even knitting. All of which show Creighton
students in action during one of the university’s numerous spring-break service
trips, a Creighton Center for Service and Justice program now in its 24th year.

A record 200 Creighton
students spent their March 6-10 spring break this year working at 25 sites
across the country. They taught grade-school students in a desperately poor
Chicago neighborhood, repaired homes in rural West Virginia, cared for elderly
and disabled nursing home residents in Kentucky, and helped clean Hurricane
Katrina’s destruction in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Not your typical stops
on the MTV spring break tour.

“It is hard to know
what to do sometimes,” says Orbik, who made her fourth such trip this year
working at a food bank and shelter in Cleveland. “These communities all across
the country want our students to come — to learn from them and with them, how
to love the poor and marginalized in our society.”

Orbik and friends
aren’t the only college students breaking with the traditional spring break
these days. More and more, students from universities across the country are
spending the annual week away from school serving others instead of themselves.

She spoke with the
Register from her cell phone en route from Break Away’s headquarters at Florida
State University to a national conference in Nashville for students involved in
service learning and activism. A crowd of 1,500 was expected.

Break Away began 15
years ago in response to the decadence that so many spring breaks had become.
“The kids go to beaches and just party nonstop for a week,” Piacitelli says. “A
lot of alcohol, a lot of pretty compromised morals.”

And all of it: there
for the world to see on corporate-backed MTV. “People give away huge cash
prizes and give away tons of free product, including alcohol,” Piacitelli says.
“It’s insanity down there.” Big cash also comes from “the kids themselves,” she
adds. “They’re pouring so much money into these; I think that made it get a lot
more wild.”

Numbers bear her out.
When Christopher Reynolds of American
Demographics magazine last looked at spring-break statistics, he reported
that students spent $1 billion between Florida and Texas in 2003.

But Break Away’s
numbers are up, too, with more than 100 chapter schools and 400-plus nonprofit
partners. The group counted 35,000 students to “bypass the beach” last year for
alternative spring breaks. Piacitelli guesses that many schools are adding one
to three trips a year as alternatives grow in popularity.

Spiritual Break

At Break Away member
James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., for instance, the trips have
become so popular since their start in 1993 that a lottery was required this
year to determine student participation. More than 300 students attended 23
alternative spring-break events.

“Parents are generally
very excited about the program,” says Lorelei Esbenshade, associate director of
James Madison’s community-service program. “Each trip has a faculty or staff
member along. They are drug- and alcohol-free service trips that include time
for reflection and learning.”

Piacitelli estimates
10- to 12% of alternative spring breaks have a religious component. That
includes a new component James Madison added this year: a trip to the Loaves
and Fishes Soup Kitchen in Nashville run by Catholic Charities Refugee
Services. Participants focused on resettlement issues, assisting with
activities for children, tending a household goods warehouse, and prepping
apartments for newly arriving refugees.

Spiritual practices
likewise constitute a significant part of the alternative spring breaks run by
Penn State University’s Catholic Campus Ministry. “All of our trips include prayer
and meditation, Mass, theological reflection and discussion,” says Benedictine
Father Matthew Laffey, director of the ministry.

There’s plenty of
work, too. The Catholic ministry
oversaw 60 students on three spring break trips — to the Gulf States region to
help with post-Hurricane efforts, the Dominican Republic to minister to Haitian
refugees, and to Tijuana, Mexico, for work on Our Lady of Angels Church and at
Casa Hogar de los Niños orphanage. Students were to present the orphanage with
clothing, shoes, toys, books, school and medical supplies — and about $5,000.

“I am touched at how
the students respond to the trips,” Father Laffey says. “Students returning
can’t wait to go back. Some of our students, because of their experiences on
these trips, end up volunteering for an extended time after graduation. Right
now, one of our 2005 graduates, Greg Mason, is living in Pandiasou, Haiti, and
working with the Brothers and Sisters of the Incarnation.”

Service Professionals

It’s not hard to
envision a similar path for Orbik after she graduates from Creighton with
majors in Spanish and justice in society. She’s a pro at spring-break service.
As a freshman she worked with Hispanic immigrants in South Omaha, Neb. Her
sophomore year she helped at a homeless shelter in Mankato, Minn. As a junior
she assisted at St. Peter the Apostle School in Pascagoula, Miss. (five months
later destroyed by Katrina), then attended a summer mission trip to Guatemala.
This year it’s Cleveland in the spring.

Her actions, and those
of other Creighton students, speak volumes — one reason why the recruiting
video she and Marie Young put together featured so many pictures. The two coeds
end their video with a challenge: “Do you have the courage and compassion to
hang out with a person who is homeless, to sit with a child learning to read or
to gut a house ravaged by a hurricane?”

At Creighton and other
universities across the country, thousands of students are spending their
spring breaks answering a resounding Yes.